Skip to main content

Is Freedom Dying in India?

 

India's status in the Freedom Report

India is set to celebrate its 75th Independence Day amid a pandemic that seems determined to teach the world certain lessons. One of the first lessons that India should learn at this juncture is the meaning of freedom.

As long as every citizen is not free – free from poverty, superstition, illiteracy, ignorance, and other such evils – the country’s independence from a foreign rule cannot make much sense. That was the firm opinion of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi. Freedom, in other words, is not mere political freedom. Freedom is personal, highly so.

It is this personal freedom that is being killed brutally by the present dispensation in Delhi. Narendra Modi has created an India that the is the exact opposite of what Gandhi had envisaged. The transition from Gandhi’s mystic vision to Modi’s cabalistic vision is total now. Even international observers have made detailed studies about it and put out reports.

Freedom House is one such international organisation whose latest report has taken India out of the list of free countries and placed it among ‘partly free’ countries. Freedom is dying in India. It is being killed slowly. Democracy is dying. Being killed by none other than the country’s Prime Minister.

“India’s status declined from Free to Partly Free,” says the report, “due to a multiyear pattern in which the Hindu nationalist government and its allies presided over rising violence and discriminatory policies affecting the Muslim population and pursued a crackdown on expressions of dissent by the media, academics, civil society groups, and protesters.”

A lot of Indians have been stripped of their various freedoms by Modi and his cabal. Muslims, academics, civil society groups, and protesters are mentioned specifically by the Freedom House Report. There are many others too who belong to that list. Dalits, for example. Stand-up comics. Cartoonists, Journalists. TV channel owners and executives. Poets. Even students and farmers. Who is left then? Who is free, that is? Only those who belong to the cabal, those who chant ‘Heil Modi’ on every available public platform.

Ask young students like Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita whether they are free in India. Ask climate activist Disha Ravi how free she feels in Modi’s India. Ask a politician like Akhil Gogoi or a much senior one like Farooq Abdullah. You have Erendro Leichombam and Kishore Chandra Wankhem from Manipur to narrate the ridiculous losses of their freedoms. Ask Aisha Sultana how a metaphor can land you in jail for treason.

You have people from every walk of life now languishing in stinking prisons, perhaps even dying there like Stan Swamy, merely for expressing their dissent with the Modi government. Of course, serious charges are levelled against them. 84-year-old Stan Swamy was accused of nothing less than treason. He conspired to kill Modi! That old man’s story is at once heart-breaking and farcical. He was arrested along with 15 others for allegedly organising the Bhima Koregaon commemoration of a battle which was won by a British army - consisting mostly of Dalits – against the Peshwas in 2018. None of the 16 arrested, except one, participated in the event. The real culprits who created the ruckus during the event were not arrested at all; they were all upper caste Hindus who supported Modi’s party. Later false data was planted in the laptops of the arrested people like old and ailing Stan Swamy, data that hit two very potent targets: 1. conspiracy to assassinate Modi (the biggest crime in the cosmos!) and 2. Maoist treason.

What was Stan Swamy’s actual crime? He had questioned many of the government’s policies that went against the interests of the Dalits.

You are not free to question the Bigg Boss of India. But you are free to celebrate the 75th Independence Day next week with him. Jai Hind.

From India Today


PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon. 

 

Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanAugust 9, 2021 at 12:41 PM

    Hari Om
    I had noted that report came out - and was glad to see the downtick against India. Now it is hoped that the world will start to make noises towards the perpetrator so that he knows he runs a risk of intervention... though saying that, without oil as a motivator, does the world at large (and the USA in particular) have any interest in helping out its neighbours? It's like COVID. Knowing the disease is one thing, eradicating it is quite another. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 10, 2021 at 9:44 AM

      In the old world, countries helped one another. Now it's like they are all trying to prove that each one of them is the best.

      Delete
  2. ArtiAugust 10, 2021 at 12:52 PM

    I read this post with a heavy heart.

    In fact, just yesterday, I finished writing the last verse of a poem I've been working on for sometime. It's about personal freedom--and what my views of independence are. The personal and the political are never separate. And therein lies the tragedy of what's happening in India today.

    Sadness and disbelief at how far we've come from the days and views of Gandhi.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 10, 2021 at 1:50 PM

      It is indeed immensely saddening. The present scenario in the country is an ideal example of how a system can distort people's thinking, attitudes and emotions.

      Delete
  3. AnandAugust 10, 2021 at 2:41 PM

    Bloggers and Vloggers are getting arrested i Kerala. Yesterday, two people were arrested in Kerala. So according to you Kerala communists can do anything.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 10, 2021 at 2:48 PM

      They are arrested for crime, not for writing or speaking... What are you trying to do here? Indulge in the typical Sanghi pastime of distorting truth?

      Delete
  4. जितेन्द्र माथुरAugust 10, 2021 at 3:38 PM

    Right you are. This freedom is a hoax. The Indian premier has even outsmarted Machiavelli. He has mastered the art of playing the victim while being the oppressor himself. Now the funny situation is that the conspirator himself spreads the news that some people are conspiring to kill him. Wow ! His weeping for the Corona victims in front of the camera must be one of the most seen video clips gone viral. After seeing that clip, the thought that came to my mind was that his performance deserved an Oscar award.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 10, 2021 at 4:11 PM

      Oscar can think of a special lifetime achievement award 😅

      Delete
  5. Prasanna RaghavanAugust 16, 2021 at 2:27 PM

    Discriminating the majority for the minory's welfare is the very seminal plot at the centre of an India evolved around the Chrisitan era, the death of the old India and the emergences of the royalty. It continues. Was Gandhi free from that ideolgy is a question when he is darkened by Ambedkar.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 16, 2021 at 6:07 PM

      Is that discrimination really true? If it were, the Muslims in India would be much better off.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
121 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
44 comments
Read more

Romance in Utopia

Book Review Title: My Haven Author: Ruchi Chandra Verma Pages: 161 T his little novel is a surfeit of sugar and honey. All the characters that matter are young employees of an IT firm in Bengaluru. One of them, Pihu, 23 years and all too sweet and soft, falls in love with her senior colleague, Aditya. The love is sweetly reciprocated too. The colleagues are all happy, furthermore. No jealousy, no rivalry, nothing that disturbs the utopian equilibrium that the author has created in the novel. What would love be like in a utopia? First of all, there would be no fear or insecurity. No fear of betrayal, jealousy, heartbreak… Emotional security is an essential part of any utopia. There would be complete trust between partners, without the need for games or power struggles. Every relationship would be built on deep understanding, where partners complement each other perfectly. Miscommunication and misunderstanding would be rare or non-existent, as people would have heightened emo...
9 comments
Read more

Tanishq and the Patriots

Patriots are a queer lot. You don’t know what all things can make them pick up the gun. Only one thing is certain apparently: the gun for anything. When the neighbouring country behaves like a hoard of bandicoots digging into our national borders, we will naturally take up the gun. But nowadays we choose to redraw certain lines on the map and then proclaim that not an inch of land has been lost. On the other hand, when a jewellery company brings out an ad promoting harmony between the majority and the minority populations, our patriots take up the gun. And shoot down the ad. Those who promote communal harmony are traitors in India today. The sacred duty of the genuine Indian patriot is to hate certain communities, rape their women, plunder their land, deny them education and other fundamental rights and basic requirements. Tanishq withdrew the ad that sought to promote communal harmony. The patriot’s gun won. Aapka Bharat Mahan. In the novel Black Hole which I’m writing there is...
61 comments
Read more

A Lesson from Little Prince

I joined the #WriteAPageADay challenge of Blogchatter , as I mentioned earlier in another post. I haven’t succeeded in writing a page every day, though. But as long as you manage to write a minimum of 10,000 words in the month of Feb, Blogchatter is contented. I woke up this morning feeling rather vacant in the head, which happens sometimes. Whenever that happens to me but I do want to get on with what I should, I fall back on a book that has inspired me. One such book is Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince . I have wished time and again to meet Little Prince in person as the narrator of his story did. We might have interesting conversations like the ones that exist in the novel. If a sheep eats shrubs, will he also eat flowers? That is one of the questions raised by Little Prince [LP]. “A sheep eats whatever he meets,” the narrator answers. “Even flowers that have thorns?” LP is interested in the rose he has on his tiny planet. When he is told that the sheep will eat f...
8 comments
Read more